SAH doesn't support change,

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-08-2003
SAH doesn't support change,
3723
Sat, 08-26-2006 - 4:58pm

"SAH doesn't support change, it supports going backwards to the 1950's,"

Statement in a post below.

I wholeheartedly disagree. To me, SAH is a choice. How is that going back to the 1950s, when a lot of women didn't have much of a choice.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 08-31-2006 - 10:46pm

"Well, I don't understand why anyone can think of it as entirely necessary, if you have a worthy alternative."

A "worthy" alternative would be a nursing license, vocational certificate, A+ certification, webdesign, heck even beauty school. Not "my grandpa would hire me at his restaurant and my mom would babysit".

"If I want a career later, I can start on that path when I'm ready. I think we should all be ready and sure of what we want before we go after it."

And many actual adults think that preparing yourself to care for AND financially support your kids should happen BEFORE having them.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 08-31-2006 - 10:51pm

"You see, the problem here is you all seem to think there's only one right way. The ONLY way to be prepared for single parenthood is to have a degree and career. The ONLY way to support education is to go to college. The ONLY way to support women's work equality is to go to work. And I think that's just BS."

Oh, baloney. There have been plenty of broader points made than that. "Prepared to support yourself and your kids" can mean job training, gaining a marketable skill, having job experience, as well as a college degree. College degree being the best bet, but I see plenty of suggestions broader that "college or nothing".

Waitressing and delivering take-out - no matter how hard you work at it - will not generate a living wage and can't be realistically seen as being "prepared to support your child".

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 08-31-2006 - 11:19pm

There's a book you need to read.

http://www.henryholt.com/holt/nickelanddimed.htm

Nickel and Dimed
On (Not) Getting By in America

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Here's an excerpt:
one

Serving in Florida

Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city. The downside of familiarity, I soon realize, is that it's not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in the very same place. I am terrified, especially at the beginning, of being recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am "baby," "honey," "blondie," and, most commonly, "girl."

My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour -- which, from the want ads, seems doable -- I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600 and still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas. In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes -- like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord's Doberman pinscher. The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. All right, Key West is expensive. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with the people who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns. Still, it is a shock to realize that "trailer trash" has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to.

So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and convenience and go for a $500-a-month "efficiency" thirty miles up a two-lane highway from the employment opportunities of Key West, meaning forty-five minutes if there's no road construction and I don't get caught behind some sundazed Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a roadside studded with white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it's a sweet little place -- a cabin, more or less, set in the swampy backyard of the converted mobile home where my landlord, an affable TV repairman, lives with his bartender girlfriend. Anthropologically speaking, the trailer park would be preferable, but here I have a gleaming white floor and a firm mattress, and the few resident bugs are easily vanquished.

The next piece of business is to comb through the want ads and find a job. I rule out various occupations for one reason or another: hotel front-desk clerk, for example, which to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and pays only $6 or $7 an hour, gets eliminated because it involves standing in one spot for eight hours a day. Waitressing is also something I'd like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone-tired when I was eighteen, and I'm decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now. Telemarketing, one of the first refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality. This leaves certain supermarket jobs, such as deli clerk, or housekeeping in the hotels and guest houses, which pays about $7 and, I imagine, is not too different from what I've been doing part-time, in my own home, all my life.

So I put on what I take to be a respectable-looking outfit of ironed Bermuda shorts and scooped-neck T-shirt and set out for a tour of the local hotels and supermarkets. Best Western, Econo Lodge, and Hojo's all let me fill out application forms, and these are, to my relief, mostly interested in whether I am a legal resident of the United States and have committed any felonies. My next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket, which turns out to have a particularly onerous application process, featuring a twenty-rninute "interview" by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed capable of representing the corporate point of view. I am conducted to a large room decorated with posters illustrating how to look "professional" (it helps to be white and, if female, permed) and warning of the slick promises that union organizers might try to tempt me with. The interview is multiple-choice: Do I have anything, such as child care problems, that might make it hard for me to get to work on time? Do I think safety on the job is the responsibility of management? Then, popping up cunningly out of the blue: How many dollars' worth of stolen goods have I purchased in the last year? Would I turn in a fellow employee if I caught him stealing? Finally, "Are you an honest person?"

Apparently I ace the interview, because I am told that all I have to do is show up in some doctor's office tomorrow for a urine test. This seems to be a fairly general rule: if you want to stack Cheerios boxes or vacuum hotel rooms in chemically fascist America, you have to be willing to squat down and pee in front of a health worker (who has no doubt had to do the same thing herself). The wages Winn-Dixie is offering -- $6 and a couple of dimes to start with -- are not enough, I decide, to compensate for this indignity.

I lunch at Wendy's, where $4.99 gets you unlimited refills at the Mexican part of the Super-bar, a comforting surfeit of refried beans and cheese sauce. A teenage employee, seeing me studying the want ads, kindly offers me an application form, which I fill out, though here, too, the pay is just $6 and change an hour. Then it's off for a round of the locally owned inns and guest houses in Key West's Old Town, which is where all the serious sightseeing and guzzling goes on, a couple of miles removed from the functional end of the island, where the discount hotels make their homes. At The Palms, let's call it, a bouncy manager actually takes me around to see the rooms and meet the current housekeepers, who, I note with satisfaction, look pretty much like me -- faded ex-hippie types in shorts with long hair pulled back in braids. Mostly, though, no one speaks to me or even looks at me except to proffer an application form. At my last stop, a palatial B & B, I wait twenty minutes to meet "Max," only to be told that there are no jobs now but there should be one soon, since "nobody lasts more than a couple weeks."

Three days go by like this and, to my chagrin, no one from the approximately twenty places at which I've applied calls me for an interview. I had been vain enough to worry about coming across as too educated for the jobs I sought, but no one even seems interested in finding out how overqualified I am. Only later will I realize that the want ads are not a reliable measure of the actual jobs available at any particular time. They are, as I should have guessed from Max's comment, the employers' insurance policy against the relentless turnover of the low-wage workforce. Most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, if only to build a supply of applicants to replace the current workers as they drift away or are fired, so finding a job is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and flexible enough to take whatever is being offered that day. This finally happens to me at one of the big discount chain hotels where I go, as usual, for housekeeping and am sent instead to try out as a waitress at the attached "family restaurant," a dismal spot looking out on a parking garage, which is featuring "Pollish sausage and BBQ sauce" on this 95-degree day. Phillip, the dapper young West Indian who introduces himself as the manager, interviews me with about as much enthusiasm as if he were a clerk processing me for Medicare, the principal questions being what shifts I can work and when I can start. I mutter about being woefully out of practice as a waitress, but he's already on to the uniform: I'm to show up tomorrow wearing black slacks and black shoes; he'll provide the rust-colored polo shirt with "Hearthside," as we'll call the place, embroidered on it, though I might want to wear my own shirt to get to work, ha ha. At the word tomorrow, something between fear and indignation rises in my chest. I want to say, "Thank you for your time, sir, but this is just an experiment, you know, not my actual life."

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-27-2003
Fri, 09-01-2006 - 2:06am
I think people misconstrue the science of brain development with character development and general growth. I never said a person stops learning and growing at a certain time. But imo, an 18yo is still a teen, and still has many of the impulses and issues that teens have-generally speaking anyway.

Dj

"Now when I need help, I look in the mirror" ~Kanye West~

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-17-2006
Fri, 09-01-2006 - 7:11am
Some food for thought. Most Americans don't have a college degree. Only 29% of men and 26% of women do. http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/collegepays.htm

So it's likely many of the posters admonishing you here - and their spouses - don't have a college degree. But try not to lose the message because of the cold method of its delivery. Personally, my biggest purpose in being a parent is to guide and encourage my children to reach their academic and intellectual potentials and go to college and grad school, even though I'm just a sahm! I would quickly return to work if I thought their public elementary schools were inferior and we couldn't afford better, or that we couldn't afford to pay for their college and grad schools in toto.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-12-2005
Fri, 09-01-2006 - 7:29am
I didn't realize you were discussing brain development specifically, I thought you were discussing development as an individual.Don't the latest studies suggest that brain growth continues through the age of 21 or is it 23? Personally, I have matured a LOT over the last 10 years. I think from age 30-40 was my greatest personal period of growth.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-12-2005
Fri, 09-01-2006 - 7:36am
I agree. Maybe it's because punkilicorn hasn't hit the big expenses of raising kids yet. I also agree about the expense of health care. My dd has to have an mri next week. I shudder to think of how we could afford it withour insurance. Last month we paid out over $600 in personal expenses for 2 of our 4 kids. One of my dds is in an activity that costs over $3,000 a year!
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-12-2005
Fri, 09-01-2006 - 7:43am
I agree that a college degree is important, however, I don't believe that one has to get a college degree to be a well rounded, educated human being. My father is one of the most intelligent people I personally know(and I know some VERY intelligent people...one of my friends is an aerospace engineer)and he doesn't have a college degree. He reads constantly! He could probably interpret many complicated physician guides as well as the average doctor.
iVillage Member
Registered: 10-31-2005
Fri, 09-01-2006 - 8:11am

I wonder if so many universities would be the "party hearty" schools they are if populated with 24-28 year olds?

I do think teens are capable of self-restraint and a measure of maturity--I was financially independent at 18, finished an undergraduate degree at 21, started teaching at 21, married at 23. I (and many of my friends) refrained from drinking and premarital sex (God forbid smoking or drugs) with no ill effects--now enjoy a glass of wine or a margarita with dinner and love having sex with the same man I married 11 years ago.

But although I practiced self-discipline and was fairly independent at an early age, I still look back at myself as very, very immature. I transferred colleges three times, changed majors at least three times. Broke a few hearts and had mine broken a few times. I thought I knew everything when I really knew nothing compared to what I know now--and now I'm aware of how much I still have to learn. That awareness is one measure of personal development.

I think I "grew up" closer to 30 than 20, in terms of true brain and character maturity, although I'll be the first to acknowledge that I still have a long way to go to achieve the wisdom of my grandfather who passed away at 92. . . or even of my mother (60) or father (70). . . or my 35 year old friend Ginger. . . or. . . . . .

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-30-2006
Fri, 09-01-2006 - 8:30am
You know, some of these posts may seem stern, it's true.

Sabina

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

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